Broken Pieces of the Same Vase
by bebitched
Summary: On a quest for salvation from his guilt, Jack visits a fellow survivor and unexpectedly finds another. Brief language.


**Title: **Broken Pieces of the Same Vase

**Characters: **Jack, Sun, Kate (implications of ships therein)

**Word Count**: 3045

**Rating**: PG13 (brief language)

**Timeline:** Sometime after rescue (about four years), but before the last off-island scene in "Through the Looking Glass"

**Summary**: On a quest for salvation from his guilt, Jack visits a fellow survivor and unexpectedly finds another.

* * *

Dust clouds billow out from beneath the treads of the tiny European car, the sun-soaked fields racing along one side of the vehicle and dark forest on the other. He checks the rearview mirror and to no surprise only empty road meets his gaze. The tiny scrap of yellowed paper hangs limply from between his fingers, the smudged ink the least of his worries in considering its legibility.

Jack is no master in speaking Italian, and he is even worse at converting its syllables into written text. There is no guarantee the address he has is the answer to what he had asked the shop girl at the café he'd questioned about it, for he isn't even sure he'd asked the right question. She'd offered him quick instructions, for more than half of them turned the opposite direction, and he'd only caught the name of the villa. Chiara. That, and the general direction. North.

This was the fourth country he traveled to in under a year, his work not keeping him nearly busy enough to keep his mind from the recollections and the guilt.

Locke had been the first and the most difficult to find, seated in the heart of Africa and purposely avoiding location by anyone. Jack had his vaccinations, met a nervously large man named Kojo and flew in a two-seater to the savanna. The trees grew horizontal and the sun set like it was melting, and he found John among an African tribe that spoke no English. They'd talked like they never could have on the island, and although he left more confused than when he had arrived, that was somehow comforting.

Jack is getting close, that much he knows from the older man he'd asked directions from a few miles back.

Jack slams on the breaks, the expansive channel of gravel road catching his eyes. He puts the car in reverse and glides along the smooth curve into the entrance, relieved the gate is swung open and not locked with chains.

As he nears the villa, Jack's first thought is how narrow it is, how perfectly it fits into his viewpoint. Yet as the clearing opens and the windshield reflects back only blue sky and lacy roof, he realizes how wrong he'd been.

The dwelling wraps around the circular drive-up, and it stretches further back than he'd estimated. The outer walls are aged, but in the rustic, not decrepit, way. Wheelbarrows and gardening tools line the shed to the side and plant life creeps into every cranny; the windowsills, the small table in front and perhaps least intuitively, the vineyard.

Jack snaps off his seatbelt, swinging out the miniature door like a beetle's wing and planting his tennis-shoed foot firmly onto to path. While he can sense someone is home inside the expansive house, there is a quality in the air - the dim light of afternoon illuminating the edges of the leaves, the silent calm that settles over the vineyard and the dipping hill beneath it, the final exhalation of stale air he hadn't realized he'd been holding in replaced with that of vibrating, humming life that he senses here - that makes him forget he isn't alone.

But too suddenly for Jack's taste, a resounding bark echoes over the villa, the second forcing him to wince. An oversized husky that more resembles a wolf than a domesticated pet bounds toward him, and Jack only has time for slight preparations before she comes paws first at Jack's chest. Surprisingly, Jack doesn't topple over and stands eye to eye with the animal, not in the least comforted by their leveled gaze.

"Down!" someone commands from a few yards away, and Jack isn't sure whether the woman was referring to him or the dog. But the canine obediently lands with a crunch on all fours and Jack isn't too keen on returning to the same height.

"Hello?" Jack questions, irritation sneaking its way into his voice as he eyes the animal warily.

A wooden gate swings open in one fluid motion, as a familiar figure steps out from the shaded corridor behind it.

Sun looks stunned, but that reaction isn't unexpected. At least she doesn't seem unhappy to see him.

"Jack?" She breathes out then in quickly, resting a hand on her chest. "This is a surprise." He pauses, waiting for a cue to step forward, for her to signal she's alright with him just showing up out of the blue. "Well come here then, don't just stand there."

He grins, glad he's a welcome visitor.

Sun wraps her frail arms around his neck, exhaling finally, as if she's glad she's sure another of the survivors is well and intact. That she's not alone in the world with what she's seen and no one else would believe.

Jack glances over her head at the villa, now feeling like more of a guest and less of an intruder in this calm, lazy residence.

"Nice place you've got here. Now I know what the Oceanic settlement bought."

Sun chuckles but waves it off, taking a step away from Jack and angling herself toward the house. "Not exactly. One million split thirty-five ways." She rolls her eyes. "That paid for the plane ticket and a new paint job. This…" Sun gestures sweepingly at the estate. "… was all Dharma."

He knits his eyebrows. "Yeah… I couldn't take it. Felt too much like blood money."

Sun swings her head toward him, her expression matching his. "You mean you didn't get anything?" she shakes her head. "Of all the people that deserve it…"

"I'm not one of them."

You are, was implicit in that statement, but Sun chooses to ignore it and bows her mouth into a tight smile.

"You should come inside. I'm assuming you're staying for the night?"

They walk together, slowly, toward the house.

Jack glances over at her sheepishly. "I wasn't going to ask if you didn't offer."

"Of course. You're welcome anytime."

Sun holds the gate open for him, then latches it behind them. The archway just ahead gives way to a courtyard, a small pond for fish, not swimming, and a tamed jungle of climbing vines on trellises and brightly colored trumpet flowers. Sun pauses to smell one, then turns to Jack.

"It's a new species they found on the island. Hundreds of dollars for a plant I first cultivated."

"Irony." Jack offers with a slight smile.

Sun nods, seeming content with that non-explanation.

They continue toward the open front door, the first façade of the house seeming to be just an extra defense against the outside world and solicitors. Of course Jack doesn't suppose they get many door-to-door salesmen here.

He looks on in awe at the sheer simple beauty of the quiet, sunlit garden. It reminds him of the island in ways that he's not sure how he feels about. Jack hasn't seen much more than the sterile operating rooms, bare bedroom and steel-cast streets of New York in two months, since his trip to the outback of Australia just as long ago.

Jack eyes the two sets of keys on the table just inside, but passes it off as the maid's. Sun couldn't possibly run the entire estate by herself.

"I noticed the vineyard. Do you make wine here?" He inquires conversationally, slipping his hands into his pockets as he surveys the living room. Sun disappears inside what he can only assume is the kitchen, and her voice comes back muffled yet still distinguishable.

"Define 'make'." She emerges from the kitchen with a bowl of grapes, cheese and crackers and sets it down with a resounding clank on the table. "We hired professionals to perform the actual labor. It's really just about paperwork and standing around looking important when the investors visit."

Jack smiles and pops a grape into his open mouth, settling into the wooden chair and the comfortable silence. He tries to find the best way to phrase the question on his mind since he'd first discovered Sun was in Italy.

"I never would have pegged you for the type."

Sun glances over at him, confused, giving her head a small shake.

"Italy. Vineyards. Doesn't really seems like it would be your dream."

She smirks to herself coyly, her eyes finding a spot on the floor as she recalls a memory.

"When I was a little girl, my father traveled often. Not usually outside the country, but he would always receive small booklets from airlines and travel agencies. Once, I was inside his office, where I should not have been, and I saw a photograph of this place on the backside of one of those booklets. Italy." Her accent temporarily returns as she speaks the word, as if she is voicing it for the first time. "As I grew older, my father traveled less and less as his business grew more successful and he sent others away to meet with clients, but I always remembered that picture. I told myself, if I ever left Korea, this was where I would come."

Jack glances away from her face, as if he is witnessing something private that he shouldn't be seeing.

"When we were rescued, I knew it was time." She composes herself, then smiles slightly. "So we came here and I can almost forget everything. Everything I was, everything that happened to us. Everything we did." Sun looks him squarely in the eyes. "You should try it sometime. You cannot punish yourself for something that was not your fault forever."

Jack wants to respond with sarcasm, or at least humor, but he can't muster the strength or the patience for either of the two.

There are noises of movement from above, at the top of the staircase, and then footsteps spiraling down toward them. Jack raises his eyes just long enough to catch sight of the head of bobbing brunette waves that flash across the doorway and to the other side.

Kate does a double take and peaks her head around the opening, wrinkling her nose.

"Jack? I thought that was you." Her expression is half relief that she is not completely crazy and half confusion over his sudden presence here. "This is… surprising." An odd smirk crosses over her face before she takes another step forward, toward Jack.

"I'll say."

Jack wouldn't say he was shocked, because his jaw wasn't resting on the floor and his eyeballs were firmly in their sockets, but Sun might.

"You mean to say you didn't know?" Sun rises slowly from her seat, smoothing out the skirt crinkled by sitting, and glances up at Jack. "I thought for sure someone would have told you."

Jack shakes his head adamantly. "No, no one told me. Of course most people aren't in the loop anymore, with each other or the state records office. Nobody seems to trust to government with their locations, which makes all this harder than it should be."

"What do you mean? Have you been trying to find the others?" Kate knots the skin between her eyes as she moves around to the other side of the table, taking a seat and gesturing for the other two to do the same.

Jack nods matter-of-factly, returning to his original place beside Sun.

"I've been looking. But it's difficult to find people that don't want to be found. Took me six months to track you down. I've gotta give you credit, it wasn't easy after you canceled all your credit cards, didn't file for a new driver's license, mail traces back to a post office box in Idaho... you covered your tracks."

Jack eyes Kate as he speaks, gauging her reactions and waits for her muscles to tense or a shadow of a frown to pass over her face. They don't and it doesn't.

In fact, Kate smiles coyly at Sun and leans forward on her elbows.

"Yeah, sorry about that. I wanted to make extra sure nobody we didn't want to see would find us. I obviously was a little too thorough."

"No problem" Jack mirrors her laidback stance, letting his shoulders relax and his hands to lay slack on his knees, "I appreciate a challenge."

For a second Jack feels the way he used to among them on the island, mind light enough to exchange quick-tongued jokes and let his eyes drop with the unseen weight dreamy sleepiness. Life was bright from the Pacific sun and easy by sunset, yet his thoughts would always snap back to the damp, dark place where slippery rocks and deep red pools haunted him. This was when he still had time to worry about accidents and not something far worse. Something deliberate in the most callous way.

Jack finds himself there again, but now the visions aren't worries, their memories. He can't feel like this anymore. It's not right.

Kate notices the tone of ruefulness pass behind his eyes and she frowns.

She doesn't envy those who can't let the past go. It took far too long for her to let her own regrets slip like sand from between her fingers, and she wouldn't want to return to that place for anything. Not for anything.

Jack knows Kate pities him, can see it in her eyes as they darken and in her lips as they pull taught across her teeth, and it drives him a little crazy. He doesn't suppose it was all that long ago that Kate was the one whose pieces were too broken to put back together again. Somewhere between mug shots and gunshots he'd become the one that was shattered and she was the one that wished she could fix him. Jack liked it better on the other side.

Sun mentions something about dinner and wine in the basement, so Jack feels himself nod, because it's polite and not because he wants to see the cracks in Kate's persona.

No, not at all.

* * *

The dinner table is overflowing with dishes that would be stamped IMPORTED and over-priced back home. Of course back home is LA and everything there is hyped far beyond the actual value. Even people. 

Conversation is light and airy, hop-scotching over the deep cavernous past and the most important things they have in common, toward the weather, the abandoned careers. They make humorous what they can and ignore the rest.

The gargantuan dog that oh-so politely greeted Jack earlier in the day now rests her jaws on his knee, staring pitifully up at him as her pupils dart from the plate to the fork to Jack's mouth.

Jack's had his fill and is more than a little drunk on home-grown wine from dusty bottles when he finally speaks again. Speaks more than useless words about things that don't matter to even the dullest person.

"How long have you two been living here?" Jack questions, and his slightly forceful tone makes Kate wince.

"Three years." Sun replies simply, innocently, as her eyes blink back large and white in the twilight. She's never seen Jack drunk before, but Kate has.

"Always together?" He doesn't mean to sound accusatory. He never does. It's a trait he recognized often in his father, his voice conveying only the darkest of his emotions, and that makes him more than a little sick.

"Always." Kate responds, but the laughter that had been in her voice a minute ago had dissipated. She is being careful now.

He smirks, but there's no humor there, only inebriated anger and confusion.

"How can you..." he tries to gather the renegade thoughts in his head while attempting to quiet the ones that were screaming that this isn't their burden to bear. It was his guilt, not theirs. "But they're gone. How can you be... happy?"

Jack doesn't want to blame them, yet he does. A part of him blames the both of them for moving on, for not being stuck like he is.

Sun grabs his hands and at first he pulls away, but she holds them, stronger now.

"None of it was your fault." Sun stretches her lips into a tight faux smile, her eyes squinting at Jack's face. He looks tired, more so now than she'd noticed in the daytime. "It wasn't..." Kate places a reassuring hand on her shoulder as Sun fights to blink back tears. "Jin... the baby... it wasn't your fault. It isn't your burden to bear."

Jack looks on her with thankful eyes, wishing he could believe her. Wishing the guilt in his heart was caused by some stupid sense of duty and not an underlying knowledge that these were his people to protect. To keep them alive and get them off that fucking island. To amputate that lame leg. To keep the Others at bay. To remember that class about neonatal he fell asleep during because he'd been up late the night before. To perform another miracle surgery on a man that hadn't walked (except he had) since he'd fallen out an eight story window onto concrete, and to convince Hurley that there was some reason beyond bad luck that crashes planes and kills little kids. But he couldn't.

Jack pats Sun's hand and nods, thanking her from his heart and allowing her, allowing them both, to believe he'll be fine.

Their consciences are clear, wiped bare and bleached, and the only thing Jack can do for them both is keep them that way. It's only his own selfishness that keeps him here, hoping to prove to himself he isn't the only one lost in purgatory.

He'd thought they were broken, that Kate and Sun are a vase he'd smashed, every piece needing to be put back together. But they are whole, the aren't empty and they are loved. Maybe they had needed to be pieced together at some junction, but he hadn't been there. They'd reconstructed themselves, intertwining, and had replaced the missing chips with those from the other. Jack can see it in their looks, in the way they touched in the kitchen making dinner, chopping vegetables and rinsing dirt off of tomatoes, when they thought he hadn't been watching, as if they could be satisfied with such simple things forever. Even in the static air that hangs between them now, Jack knows.

This was a mistake, he realizes, as the way toward the villa becomes the way out and he's picking up speed.

They don't need him here.


End file.
